1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to an improved data processing system and in particular to a computer implemented method and apparatus for generating queries. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to a computer implemented method, apparatus, and computer usable program code for automatically generating semantically valid queries in the XQuery language.
2. Description of the Related Art
XQuery is the query language for extensible markup language (XML). A query is a request or a specific set of instructions for extracting particular data from a database. Queries are made up of data items or fields to be retrieved and may have limits set on the scope of the data and/or sorting order specified.
XQuery is being developed to provide a flexible and standardized way of searching through semi-structured data that is physically stored as XML, virtualized as XML, or viewed as XML via middleware. XQuery provides a mechanism to extract and manipulate data from XML documents or any data source that can be viewed as XML, such as relational databases or office documents. XQuery is designed to be broadly applicable across many types of XML data sources.
For example, just as structured query language (SQL) is a query language that queries relational tables to create new relational tables, XQuery queries XML documents to create new XML documents. XQuery is still under development, and at present, there are no known solutions directed toward automatically generating test input to test the functionality of a query processing engine.